A Bird Came Down the Walk.

Emily Dickinson's poem "A Bird Came Down the Walk." is an excellent example of how poets use varying styles of rhyme and meter to bring a poem to life. Dickinson expertly uses meter to show how the bird acts on the ground and in the air. The rhyme scheme she uses changes in the poem to show the birds change in attitude.

The poem is five quatrains long. In each stanza, except for the fourth, uses iambic trimeter in every line but the fourth line which uses iambic tetrameter. The fourth stanza uses iambic trimeter in all four lines. Iambic tells the reader that the second syllable on each foot is stressed. Trimeter means that the line contains three stressed syllables and tetrameter means there are four stresses. Meter plays a very important role in poems because it gives the poet ...